In the wake of John Burt Foster, Jr.'s research on Nabokov and European
modernism,1 I would like to explore, through an analysis of "Mademoiselle
O," Nabokov's anchorage in and heritage of French culture. "Mademoiselle
O" is one of only two texts Nabokov wrote in French, the other being "Pouchkine,
ou le vrai et le vraisemblable," composed on the occasion of the centenary
of the poet's death and published in March 1937 in La Nouvelle Revue
Française.2 According to Brian Boyd, "Mademoiselle O" was composed
in two or three days at the end of the first week of January 1936, Nabokov
having been asked to read a piece in French in Brussels. That evening
at the Pen Club was such a success that he was asked to read the same
text again in Paris. Thanks to editor Jean Paulhan, "Mademoiselle O" was
published in Mesures on April 15, 1936.

The story is based on Nabokov's childhood memory of his Swiss governess,
Cécile Miauton, who came to live with the Nabokovs in Russia from 1906
to 1913. In the early 1920s, Nabokov called on her in Lausanne, Switzerland.
After this visit and the announcement of her death, he took her as a model
for his fiction, first in the short story entitled "Easter Rain" in 1925.
He would also allude to her in the novel written in Russian The Defense
(1930); and in Ada (1969) through the character of the governess
Mlle Larivière. It was Cécile Miauton who taught him French and initiated
him into French literature by reading aloud to him during whole afternoons
in Vyra and St-Petersburg. Nabokov rewrote the text of "Mademoiselle O"
numerous times and subsequently translated it into English. It appeared
in the final English version of his autobiography Speak, Memory: An
Autobiography Revisited in 1967. According to Foster, however, the
original French version of the story "marks his closest approach to France
and French modernism and clearly ranks with Invitation to a Beheading
as one of the major breakthroughs in his career."3

Given that "Mademoiselle O" is, as Nabokov notes in his preface to Speak,
Memory, "the essay that initiated" the writing of his autobiography,
the text raises the issue of origins and serves as evidence of how France,
the French language, and French literature played an important role in
Nabokov's life and works.

Even before Nabokov lived in France (from January 1937 to May 1940),
his family had regularly travelled there for the holidays. In autumn 1909,
they went to Biarritz, in south-western France, to spend two months. It
is here that Nabokov met his first love, an event he narrates in the seventh
chapter of his autobiography. At the time he was only ten years old, and
the girl, whom he calls Colette in Speak, Memory, was in fact
a Parisian girl named Claude Despres. The Nabokovs returned to France
several times. At the beginning of the seventh chapter of Speak, Memory,
Nabokov writes: "In the far end of my mind I can unravel, I think, at
least five such journeys to Paris, with the Riviera or Biarritz as their
ultimate destination."4 And it was also on the French
Riviera that Humbert Humbert (who was born in Paris and whose father,
a Swiss citizen of mixed French and Austrian descent, owns a hotel on
the Riviera)5 meets his first love Annabel Lee at the age of 13.6 Nabokov
must have practised the French he had been taught by Mademoiselle during
the holidays he spent on the Riviera. Much later in life, to the question
as to which of the languages he spoke he considered the most beautiful,
he answered: "My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French."7

It was not only France and the French language that played important
parts in Nabokov's life and works, but also French culture, especially
French literature. In "Mademoiselle O," Nabokov mentions (in a paragraph
that he was to omit from the later English version of the story) that
in Russia at the time of his childhood so strong was the French tradition
that French was commonly spoken, though interspersed with Russian terms.
This was a distinctive variety of French that mimed Russian syntax but
sometimes reached a high level of mastery, in keeping with the kind of
poetic language that Russian readers esteemed. Nabokov distinguishes the
French literature read by Russian readers of that era and the French literature
praised by Mademoiselle from the works he himself read with pleasure and
perhaps took as models. In the first category he places French romantic
poets of the nineteenth century such as Prudhomme and Musset, as well
as the French and Belgian poets Maeterlinck, Verhaeren and Rostand. As
for Mademoiselle, she had a mania for Racine and Corneille, the great
classic writers of the seventeenth century known for the purity, simplicity,
and loftiness of their style. This Nabokov loathed, considering this type
of writing both commonplace and poor. Unsurprisingly, Nabokov felt at
ease with the baroque energy of Rabelais and Shakespeare. As for the poets
he appreciates, he alludes to Verlaine and Mallarmé, both of whom belong
to the nineteenth century. During interviews published in Strong Opinions,8
he also mentions Rimbaud, Chateaubriand, and Baudelaire, but he mainly
values prose writers, such as Flaubert (whose Madame Bovary he
taught while at Cornell), and Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time
he ranked among the six best prose pieces of the twentieth century (along
with Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Transformation, and Biely's
Petersburg.9) The relationship between Nabokov and Proust was
studied in depth by Foster, and Maurice Couturier has considered Nabokov's
admiration for Flaubert. Couturier even concludes his article by asserting:
"Nabokov is considered as a metafictional writer but he belongs to a much
older tradition of great fiction writers, going all the way back to Cervantes
and Sterne."10 In my view, Nabokov fits in with a French literary background
for two other reasons.

"Mademoiselle O" belongs to a French tradition of introspection, and
its use of the autobiographical mode goes back to Montaigne's Essays
and Rousseau's Confessions, which Nabokov had read. Introspection,
being the art of observing oneself, is particularly characteristic of
the writings of Montaigne, whom Paul de Man described as "a man who observes
himself in the act of writing." In his address to the reader, Montaigne
declares: "I desire therein to be delineated in mine own genuine, simple,
and ordinary fashion, without contention, art, or study: for it is myself
I portray."11 Likewise, Montaigne adds "Thus, gentle reader, myself am the
groundwork of my book."12 Montaigne explains how he wants to observe himself,
to analyse his thoughts and his states of mind. He is both the subject
and the object of his observation. He wrote his Essays in 1580.
Two centuries later, Rousseau was to declare in his own address to the
reader: "Here is the sole portrait of a man depicted from nature."13 Foster
believes that in "Mademoiselle O," Nabokov has written a memoir crafted
as a portrait but composed of elements from his past that create a portrait
of the author himself, all the more so as "Mademoiselle O" is indeed the
cornerstone of Nabokov's autobiography.

The common thread linking Montaigne, Rousseau and Nabokov is their desire
to create a new kind of writing through the description, analysis and
portrayal of their own selves. Both Rousseau and Nabokov treat the theme
of childhood to give depth and authenticity to the construction of their
selves, but Nabokov, in writing of his childhood, seems to be reacting
against the encroachment of fiction-writing on his past, his memory, and
his self. Such reaction has been explained by French philosopher Maurice
Blanchot, who believes that when fiction writers keep diaries, it is because
they want to remain linked to reality and real life. He asserts in The
Literary Space: " The diary is not essentially a confession, a narrative
of oneself. It is a chronicle. What must writers remember? Themselves,
the ones they are when they do not write, when they live everyday life,
when they are alive and true, and not dying and without any truth."14 It
is precisely this problematic of life and death that allows a rapprochement
with another leading writer of the French literary tradition, André Gide,
since "Mademoiselle O" can be seen as having parallels with Gide's hymn
for life, happiness and pleasure as expressed in Les Nourritures terrestres
(Fruits of the Earth), published in 1897 but not critically acclaimed
until the 1920s.

Whereas Montaigne, in the wake of Greek philosophy, wrote in the Essays
that he wanted to learn how to die, Gide could be said to be learning
how to live. I would argue then that the plea for life that appeared in
the second half of the twentieth century in French philosophy as expounded
by writers such as Derrida had already been present in the beginning of
the century in France among authors as different as Gide and Nabokov.
Derrida's affirmation of life was manifest early in his work, for example
in his study of Freud in The Postcard (1980), where he insists
on Freud's concept of the life instinct. In a more recent study of French
writer Hélène Cixous, HC pour la vie, c'est à dire (in English,
HC for life, that is to say), published in 2002, Derrida insists
on the particularity of Hélène Cixous's oeuvre which, according to him,
emphasizes the necessity of and the plea for life, since there
exists a life impulse even before the opposition between life and death.
Cixous, contrary to Heidegger's being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode) insists
on "the being-toward-life." In French, Heidegger's "Sein zum Tode" was
translated as "être-pour-la-mort." Therefore Derrida uses the expression
"être-pour-la-vie," insisting on the word pour, meaning "for."
There is a being not only toward life but for life,
for a certain "real" kind of life, a life which not only resists death
but is characterized by its intensity, its worth and value, a will to
live to use Nietzsche's phrase.

Gide and Nabokov resemble one another in their plea for life through
a personal quest for happiness. In Gide's Fruits of the Earth,
life is fundamental and every form of it should be tasted. For him, "life
had a wild and sudden flavour" and he was glad that "happiness here should
be like an efflorescence upon things dead."15 As
for Nabokov, Mademoiselle reminds him of moments of happiness which he
does not express literally in the story but which he was to formulate
in the third chapter of his autobiography when he writes: "A sense of
security, of well-being, of summer warmth, invades my memory . . . Everything
is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die..."16
Memory therefore entails happiness. For Gide, happiness is the result
of the intensity of the pleasures he experiences in life. Thus, the narrator
exclaims: "Joys of the heart, Joys of the mind - But it is you, pleasures,
that I sing" (p. 65) Pleasures are to be sought because of their sensuality:
"And the image of life for me, ah, Nathaniel! is a fruit rich in flavour
on lips thirsty with longing."17 A similar sensuality appears in Nabokov's
fiction, which is full of words such as "bliss" (complete sensuous and
spiritual happiness), "thrill" (a surge of emotion and excitement) and
"tingle" (a shiver). In the envoy of Lectures on Literature,
Nabokov concludes his book as follows: "After all, there are other thrills
in other domains: the thrill of pure science is just as pleasurable as
the pleasure of pure art. The main thing is to experience that tingle
in any development of thought or emotion. We are liable to miss the best
of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves
just a little higher that we generally are in order to sample the rarest
and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer."18 It is notable
that words such as "pleasure," "thrill," "life," "learn," and "fruit"
are common to Gide's and Nabokov's works. The word "experience" as used
by Nabokov recalls Blanchot's commentary on Fruits of the Earth,
which, according to him, represents an example of the literature of experience
in the tradition of Montaigne, Rimbaud and German romantic poets such
as Novalis. Literature aims at an effect that must affect the whole being.
Nevertheless, death plays an important part in the story: Mademoiselle's
death, for example, is presaged by and associated with the old, fat and
awkward swan Nabokov had seen during his walk along the lake. "Mademoiselle
O" offers a plea for life even as death, mourning and nostalgia undermine
it. For Gide, on the contrary, one must live here and now, in the presence
of the moment. He writes: "Put your happiness in the present moment"19 or
"the smallest moment of life is stronger than death and cancels it."20 Thus,
whereas one can read in Gide: "The most beautiful memory seems to me nothing
but a piece of wreckage left by happiness,"21 Nabokov considers his past
to be "chaud et vivant," warm and alive. For him, memory allows the past
to live again but in a comforting way.

Living, for Nabokov, is equally the experience of a gift, as is writing.
In the first paragraph of the story, he declares that every time he offers
some part of his past to one of the characters in his books, he feels
dispossessed of himself. Playing on the semantic chain of "lending, taking,
giving, losing," Nabokov explains how he has the impression that his characters
have "appropriated" his past whenever he lent them some portion of it.
Writing is therefore associated with the act of giving something of oneself,
losing it, and nevertheless feeling that it has somehow managed to survive.
Survival is a term that does not appear per se in the French version of
"Mademoiselle O," but it is mentioned in the last paragraph of the final
version in Speak, Memory, to which Nabokov added the following
information: "There is an appendix to Mademoiselle's story. When I first
wrote it I did not know about certain amazing survivals."22 For Derrida,
survival consists in living on but also in living more, as the German
word "überleben" suggests.

Moreover, Nabokov explains how he has the strange and paradoxical impression
that he has invented his governess when writing about her as if she were
a mere character in his fiction and not a real person. Wondering if she
really did live, he seems to answer in the negative: the story's final
sentence is: "Cette existence que je lui donne serait une marque de gratitude
très candide, si elle avait vraiment existé."23
["This existence I am giving her would be the mark of a very honest gratitude
if she had really existed."] His governess is true and real because he
has created her, because he has given her an existence in the process
of writing. He has made her exist by giving her a name and a body. Writing
is not merely a mark of gratitude, the acquittal of a debt; it is beyond
a mere exchange between having, giving and thanking; it is giving what
one does not have, to borrow a formula of the French psychoanalyst and
philosopher Jacques Lacan, for whom loving is giving what one does not
have. Unsurprisingly, it was during the same period, the late 1930s, that
Nabokov was writing a book which he was to entitle Dar (The
Gift).

That Nabokov read Montaigne, Rousseau and Gide24 is not of major importance.
Influence may operate in various ways, as Harold Bloom, Michel Foucault
and Jacques Derrida have suggested. My intention here has been merely
to point out textual echoes of different literary texts and emphasize
Nabokov's taste for life, perhaps most akin to Gide's as expressed in
his Fruits of the Earth.

24. Leonid Livak devotes almost a whole chapter
to Gide’s influence on Nabokov in his book entitled How It Was
Done in Paris. Russian Emigré Literature and French Modernism
(Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).

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